Profile
Biography
Sophie's critical expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. She carried out postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania (Thouron Fellowship) and then the University of York, where her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between naming and identity in late eighteenth-century English literature. She then spent five years as a Lecturer at Cardiff University, where she taught a range of critical and creative modules. She is author of Reading With The Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and editor of New Perspectives on the Burney Family (Duke University Press, 2018), and has published articles and chapters in Nineteenth-Century Prose, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Life, and Historical Fiction Now. She is General Editor of the Burney Journal, and was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded collaborative research project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', based at the John Rylands Library.
Sophie is also a creative writer of prose fiction and autofiction. In 2012 she won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award with her debut novel Rites (Route Publishing). Her next novel, Monster: A Tale, will be published by Northodox Press in 2026. She has also published several short stories, and had creative non-fiction commissioned for BBC radio. Her creative writing has received generous support from Arts Council England, New Writing North, and the Society of Authors.
Research
Overview
Critical
Sophie's critical expertise is in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. Her core interests are: women's writing, especially the novel; naming and identity; reading practices; cultures of collection; correspondence networks; and life-writing. In recent years, her research in these areas has addressed the talented and influential Burney family - particularly the novelist and diarist Frances Burney (1752-1840) and her brother, the critic and collector Charles Burney (1757-1817) – and their circles. Her most recent publication is Reading With the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has published articles addressing Frances Burney's scientific sociability, Elizabeth Montagu's fictive kinship, and the personal name as unit of surveillance in the writing of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham. She has also edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life called 'New Perspectives on the Burney Family'. Her research has been supported by competitive fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, McGill University and the John Rylands Library, among others.
Between 2019 and 2023 Sophie was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', based at the John Rylands Library. She managed the Reading Practices strand of the project, which aimed to investigate how the Mary Hamilton archive might alter scholarly understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth century patterns of textual circulation, reception and response. She is currently preparing articles addressing (i) her findings in this area (ii) Hamilton's fraught relationship with the future George IV (iii) Hamilton's literary and sociable relations with Frances Burney. With her Co-investigators David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, she is co-editing a special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies called Mary Hamilton and Her Circles: Gender, Sociability, Manuscript. In 2022 the team published their open access digital edition The Mary Hamilton Papers (c.1740-c.1850). This open access resource presents 3000 items of life writing (diaries, letters and manuscript books) as high-resolution images, metadata, and transcribed text with an editorial gloss. Sophie also manages a public engagement programme associated with the project called '#MeToo in the Georgian Court'.
Sophie has a strong side-interest in the writing of Hilary Mantel. In 2023 her reflective creative-critical essay, 'Naming Names: Reflections on Referentiality in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy', was published in Historical Fiction Now, eds. Mark Eaton and Bruce Holsinger (Oxford University Press).
Other ongoing research projects include: a monograph entitled The Point of the Name: Onomastics, Identity, and the Novel, 1759-1817; an article called 'To Give Birth to Valuable Productions: John Trusler's Literary Society', and an essay on the death writing of Hester Thrale Piozzi.
Creative
In 2012 Sophie published her debut novel Rites, which won the Arts Council England Next Great Novelist Award, was described by Philip Pullman as "terrific", and was published in German by Kein & Aber. Her creative-critical essay about motherhood and mobility, Walking Matilda, was aired on BBC Radio 3 in 2021 and featured in Writers on Walks, an audio anthology published by Penguin, in 2023. This gradually evolved into a full-length novel, set in York and addressing maternal ambivalence, called Monster: A Tale. Monster was written with generous support from Arts Council England and the Society of Authors, and this enabled Sophie to draft her novel in consultation with researchers in perinatal mental health and the psychological effects of pregnancy loss. The manuscript was also shortlisted for the 2023 Northern Writers' Awards. It will be published by Northodox Press in 2026.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Sophie currently convenes and teaches the second-year undergraduate modules Creative Writing: Contemporary Practice and Inventing Britain 1700-1830. In the past, she has contributed to undergraduate modules including Jane Austen, The Business of Books, Adventures in the Archive, and Writing Now. She contributes to the MA modules Romantic Texts and Contexts, Wollstonecraft to Austen: Femininity and Literary Culture, and Critical Approaches to the Creative Industries.
Sophie supervises dissertations at undergraduate and taught postgraduate level. She has supervised or co-supervised doctoral projects addressing, among other things; the literary influences of Hester Thrale Piozzi; form in the diaries of Anne Lister; a previously unknown Burney family archive; the 'mental health novel' and the York Retreat; mourning and materiality in eighteenth-century women's poetry; and the satirical novel of metamorphosis. She runs a training session for the department's community of doctoral researchers called 'Working with Manuscripts'. She is an active member of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Writers at York group.
External activities
Overview
As a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, Sophie is passionate about communicating academic research to a wide audience and understanding how it creates change in the world. She has written, presented and guested on more than 25 programmes, features and podcasts for BBC Radio: sample topics include marital naming, children's literature, contemporary attitudes towards death, the history of the York Retreat, Georgian entertainments, and the myth of Thomas Chatterton. She has also co-devised and appeared on a six-part podcast series for The New Statesman: 'The Great Forgetting: Women Writers Before Austen'. Amongst others, she has written for BBC Arts, the Guardian, the TLS, History Today, and the Independent. She has undertaken training and assessment activity for the BBC and AHRC.
She is currently Impact Officer for the Department of English and Related Literature. In this role she supports colleagues who are interested in bringing their research to audiences, and creating change, outside academia.
